


The Sendoff

by WomanInWhite



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 9.23, Spoiler Alert - Freeform, do you believe in miracles?, spn spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-21
Updated: 2014-05-21
Packaged: 2018-01-26 00:14:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1667690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WomanInWhite/pseuds/WomanInWhite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This story is based off of the recently-aired season 9 finale. Don't read if you don't wanted anything spoiled.</p>
<p>To avoid unwanted spoilers, a short description will be in the author's notes above the story instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sendoff

**Author's Note:**

> When Dean dies, Sam is left behind to grieve, and to say goodbye.
> 
> A short story, meant to take place right after Dean's death in the season 9 finale.

He didn’t say a word in the moments after Dean died. There was nothing he could say. He could only feel the immediate loss, the vacuum in his chest where every hope and dream he had for his brother had disappeared irreplaceably. He held Dean close, knowing that it would do nothing to fill the gap, would do nothing at all because Dean was no longer in that broken body.

Sam cursed Dean in his mind.

_Why did you have to go alone, you idiot?_

_How many times did I tell you this wouldn’t end well?_

_You agreed to do this together._

Still, Dean lay limp in his arms.

And so Sam scooped Dean up in his arms, hardly bothered with wondering why Metatron hadn’t come back to finish him off, to eliminate the threat of revenge that would surely come as soon as Sam had gotten a hold of himself. It was a feeling he was all too familiar with, one that had previously consumed his life and nearly triggered an apocalypse with its ferocity. Metatron was too smart not to know his and Dean’s reputation for cataclysmic vengeance. So why didn’t he finish off both of them, the way every enemy before him failed to do and died for it?

Still, it was hardly worth a thought. There were more important things to take care of.

He walked through the homeless community that he’d threatened only minutes before, back when he still had a hope that Dean was still alive. His arms were full of Dean. It would have been easy for any one of them to strike him down. But they just stared at the body in his arms and cleared the way with hardly more than a murmur.

He laid Dean in the backseat of the Impala, covering him with his jacket, and began the drive back to the bunker. _Back home_ , he thought. Dean had considered it one. It was only right to take him there to rest. And he was composed for most of the ride, except for the brief bursts of grief that had him slamming at the steering wheel with choked sobs for a moment before calming himself down to focus on the road, at the double yellow lines that seemed to hypnotize him into a state of quiet suffering.

At the bunker, he laid Dean on one of the tables in the library and cleaned up the wounds on his face carefully, as if Dean would suddenly hiss in pain and snap at him as he’d done so many times before (how he could take bullet with less fuss than an alcohol wipe had always been a mystery to Sam), before bringing him to his room and setting him down on his bed.

And Sam was done, for the day at least. There was nothing left to do and his idle mind drew him to the chair beside the bed, keeping his eyes glued on Dean’s face, which had grown pale and cold, and had it really been that long already? It was only a few hours, he knew, but it was hard to imagine he’d lived even that long without him again when every other time he’d lost his brother, he swore he wouldn’t be able to survive it again.

“I get it, now.” Sam’s voice came out cracked and quiet, though it sounded much too loud in the silence that seemed to drape over the bunker, as if the fortress had sensed that Dean, the one who had taken so much care to spread warmth and comfort into its walls, was gone for good and was mourning his absence. “I know why you did what you did.”

He understood why Dean had tricked him into letting Gadreel in. It was still unforgivable, but Sam still wanted to forgive Dean, just so he could have died without that weight on him that he knew was at least partly responsible for triggering his nothing-to-lose attitude that led him to getting the Mark.  Even still, the idea hung in the air, of how he could return Dean to his body. Now, hating himself for it, Sam so desperately wanted Dean back. Mark and all. It didn’t matter.

But at the same time, it was the only thing that did. The only thing that was stopping him.

“You didn’t want to turn into something you weren’t. So…” He took in a shaky breath and said, “I won’t try to bring you back. This is it.”

He pulled a fist up to his chest, pushing his knuckles hard into his sternum to try and soothe the pain that had swelled up inside of him, but it wouldn’t go away. Instead, it rose, rattling between his ribs in pangs of physical agony until it ripped out of his throat in a miserable cry. He curled over himself, clutching at his hair that Dean had teased him about cutting the last time he’d really been himself not too long ago, tears overflowing from him in big fat drops that slid down his nose and splashed onto the floor of Dean’s pristinely clean room. He grit his teeth as he smothered the sounds of his lament behind his knuckles tightly pressed against his mouth.

As the wave of sorrow came and went, gently ebbing and flowing like the shores of a lake, Sam sniffed and said softly, “I just wish we could go back, y’know. Before… Ruby. Before Lillith. The apocalypse. All of this. I know things would probably never go back to the way they were but… I wish we’d gotten the chance to fix things.”

He reached over to the bed, taking Dean’s cold hand in his and holding onto it for a long time, taking deep, steadying breaths to maintain the quiet calm within the stone walls.

Finally, he muttered, voice wrecked but clear enough to cut through the silence, “It’s okay, though. Even if that’s all the time we got together, even if things didn’t end so great, still… We really did the best we could. I’m proud of us, too.”


End file.
